Lambda Newsflashes

Lambda is very proud to announce our latest research award winners, including the first ever Grant Halle Lambda Award at Laurentian University. The winner is Kirby Johnson, a Masters student in Human Kinetics.At Carleton University, two PhD students are sharing our newly named Gary Sealey Friends of Lambda Award: Melanie Rickert in Sociology and Charlotte Hoelke in Canadian Studies. Melanie won the Lambda award as an MA student a couple of years ago for her project on the LGBTI community in St. Petersburg, Russia and will continue to focus on that country and its queer communities. Charlotte is researching the ways in which Indigenous erotic arts engage in decolonization efforts by voicing their own perspectives and views of sexuality and gender, and envisioning new Indigenized futures free of subjugation and assimilation. She is also interested in how Indigenous erotica can be used as a teaching tool, and as a catalyst to foster much-needed conversations between scholars of Indigenous Studies and Queer Theory. At the University of New Brunswick, the current winner of the Christian Landry Memorial Award is Amanda Jardine, a queer activist, writer and PhD student, who is examining representations of queer women in popular television, film and online media.We will have more details about our winners’ projects as they come in so watch for updates on this web site, our FB page, Twitter and Reddit.

Lambda’s awards for excellent research and writing have been endowed with the purpose of supporting education in human rights, specifically on sexual orientation and gender identity. Our winners will become the professors, teachers, writers, film makers, health care professionals,international workers, lawyers, etc. who will bring an enlightened view of LGBTI issues to their colleagues, clients/students and audiences in their respective fields. Our awards also foster a more LGBTI-supportive atmosphere at our nine host universities.

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Lambda has a new name: Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada. We changed it because potential donors sometimes confused our previous name, Lambda Literary and Scholarship Foundation, with the Lambda Literary Foundation in the United States. We will still be known to you, in short form, as Lambda Foundation/Fondation Lambda. We have retained our charitable status as well. That means we still issue tax receipts for donations. See the Donate Tab at the top of this home page. Any time is a good time to donate to Lambda! Thank you!

]]>jacobschweda@hotmail.com (secretary)frontpageFri, 28 Nov 2014 16:25:02 +0000Congratulations -- twice -- to our former president, Gary Sealeyhttp://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92%3Athe-gary-sealey-friends-of-lambda-prize-honours-our-former-president&lang=en
http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=92%3Athe-gary-sealey-friends-of-lambda-prize-honours-our-former-president&lang=enThe Mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, has announced that Gary Sealey, our former president, is a 2014 recipient of the Order of Ottawa, a special honour for local citizens who have made outstanding contributions to life in the city in many areas. Congratulations, Gary! We are very proud of you.

The Lambda Board of Directors recently renamed our award at Carleton University in Ottawa the Gary Sealey Friends of Lambda Award in honour of Gary and the many Friends of Lambda who helped establish and sustain this Foundation. Gary and his associates put many hours into converting Lambda from a 1980s gay business association to a scholarship foundation that has established nine university research awards to date, plus a Lambda youth leadership award at a high school on the west coast. Over all those years, Gary was ever-present with Lambda in one capacity or another, most recently as the president of the Foundation until he retired from the board two years ago. He is pictured here cutting our 25 anniversary cake in 2010.

Gary is a visionary with a great talent for making contacts and networking with individuals and human rights groups across the country – building bridges, he likes to call it -- and was particularly adept at persuading generous donors to establish or contribute to one or more of our Lambda awards. Our Carleton University endowment regularly pays out an annual Lambda award worth over $2,000 for a deserving graduate student engaged in excellent research on LGBTI rights and related issues, thanks to Gary and Friends.

In line with Gary’s preferences, and growing trends in both LGBTI scholarship and human rights activism, we have updated the criteria for this award, starting in the current academic year. Preference will be given to research proposals concerning on the fight for LGBTI rights and issues overseas while, at the same time, projects that focus on Canada will always be welcome. The bottom line will be the academic excellence of the winning research proposal. The new description of the Gary Sealey Friends of Lambda Award can be found at the Lambda university endowments link on our website:

Graduate and undergraduate students at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario now have their own LGBTI award - the Grant Halle Lambda Foundation Award – the first of our university endowments in Northern Ontario. The presence of such an award is a great way to help counter the remaining elements of a chilly climate for LGBTI students and staff at Laurentian, as documented in a 2012 survey by the campus-wide Sexuality and Diversity Committee.At that point, the atmosphere at Laurentian was getting better for some LGBTI people, but there was still a way to go to make everyone feel welcome.This new award will help by encouraging Laurentian students to openly tackle LGBTI issues in their studies and their professors to support their efforts.

The endowment is now valued at over $17,000 dollars, including the interest on its investment. The major donor, Grant Halle (pictured here) has contributed over $13,600 to the endowment to date from his own antiques business, Lambda has contributed another $2,000, while the Development Office at Laurentian helped raise another $1,000 from staff contributions. We will keep building the endowment over the next few years until the annual award is worth at least $1000. Here is the official award description:

The Grant Halle Lambda Foundation Award

For excellence in graduate or undergraduate research or applied projects in English or French in any academic or professional field that engenders greater knowledge of lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited (in indigenous peoples), transgender, or intersex individuals and populations in all their diversities, especially in, but not limited to, northern Canada. The award is open to all qualifying students, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, on the recommendation of their academic or professional programs.

Lambda is very grateful to Grant Halle for his generosity in establishing this award. For their support we also thank Laurentian's president, Dominic Giroux; Prof. Joël Dickinson, who is co-chair of the Sexuality and Diversity Committee on campus; Stephanie Corrigan, the manager of the university’s Acquisition Program and her staff; and Sarah Gatza, Chris Grimard and other members of the Pride Centre for their help in getting the word out on campus for the Grant Halle Lambda Foundation Award.

You can throw your support behind Grant Halle and the campus team by clicking on the Donate button at the top of our homepage. You can donate to Lambda Foundation through CanadaHelps or by sending us a cheque. Thank you so much!

]]>gil@directobjective.ca (secretary)frontpageMon, 10 Feb 2014 22:05:22 +0000Introducing the latest member of our Lambda team.http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93%3Aintroducing-the-latest-member-of-our-lambda-team&lang=en
http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93%3Aintroducing-the-latest-member-of-our-lambda-team&lang=enJefferson Morris IV is very excited to start working with the Lambda Foundation as the Social Media Coordinator volunteer. He hails from Nova Scotia, grew up in Kuwait and Pennsylvania, and currently calls Montreal home. He graduated from McGill University in May 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science, sociology, and sexual diversity studies. As an undergrad, Jefferson was involved with LGBTI issues, student support programs, and event-planning and promotion. He hopes to dedicate his career to improving the lives of minority groups, particularly queer ones. Welcome, Jefferson!

Cailey Dover, who is investigating the history and progress of LGBT rights in Guadeloupe and Jamaica, is the first person to win the Lambda award at Ottawa U since it was renamed in the Nicole LaViolette Friends of Lambda Prize last year. Cailey is a graduate student in Political Science with a specialization in Women’s Studies. For her Master’s thesis research, she is carrying out a comparative examination of the legal and other colonial traditions in Jamaica (English common law) and Guadeloupe (French civil law), and the different impacts they have had on LGBT peoples, their rights and their activism in those two countries. There is still very little academic research on LGBT rights in the Caribbean and this thesis will be among the pioneer student contributions to this field.

Aside from her research interests, Cailey has been active in the LGBT community in Ottawa. She is a member of Amnesty International and helped organize the Capital Pride human rights vigil in 2013, among other activities.

Professor Nicole LaViolette

The Lambda Foundation renamed its award at Ottawa U to honour one of our first prize winners at that institution, Professor Nicole LaViolette of the Faculty of Law (pictured above), who has since become an internationally renowned scholar, as well as a local activist, in LGBT refugee rights. The new name also honours the many Friends of Lambda, who established and sustained the original endowment.

Lambda is conducting an ongoing campaign to increase the endowment of this award, which we hope you will support. Please go to the How to Donate tab at the top of this home page.

]]>jacobschweda@hotmail.com (Written by President 16 November 2013)frontpageSat, 08 Sep 2012 21:31:27 +0000U of Manitoba award winner examines enforced gender identity norms on intersex peoplehttp://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=91%3Asecretary&lang=en
http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=91%3Asecretary&lang=enCongratulations to Katelyn Dykstra Dykerman, a second-year PhD student in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at The University of Manitoba and the current winner of Lambda’s Les McAfee Memorial Award. She tells us: “My current research engages questions regarding the eugenic treatment of LGBTI+ peoples but instead of focusing on historical eugenics, as I have done in my previous research, I discuss current debates regarding LGBTI+ people in the realm of genetics. I focus particularly on contemporary debates surrounding the medical treatment of intersex conditions and how these treatments can and do mirror the exclusionary practices of historical eugenics in an effort to construct clear, and normalized, bodily categories of sex, gender, and sexuality.”

Katelyn is a member of the Queer Biopolitics research cluster at the Institute for the Humanities, as well as a casual contributor to Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality Blog. She is also actively involved in graduate student politics both at the departmental and larger institutional level. Her research interests include queer theory, biopolitics, and early 20th century literature.

This research will focus on the rise of gay-bashing videos since 2011. It will situate this rise in the political context of anti-gay laws in the countries where the videos I study originate, and also study the increase in relation to different anthropological and socio-historical theories concerning the sources and motivations behind acts of homophobic violence. The research corpus will consist of three videos from Russia (“Putin's Crackdown on LGBT Teens in Russia”), Libya (“Gay Torture and Violence in Libya”), and Uganda (“African Man Burned to Death”). The analysis will be performed in three stages: first, studying the form and content of the videos as such; then, analyzing their circulation and the different users that distribute these videos online; and finally, examining their reception through paying attention to comments from other users. I will attempt to show how the gay-bashing videos effect a break from the concept that YouTube and other social media platforms are liberators and places for self-expression (particularly for members of the LGBT communities) by transforming these sites into places of humiliation, tripled by recording physical humiliation and then spreading it over the Internet. I will then try to see how the circulation and redistribution of these videos by different groups and users are exploiting them according to various political and ideological agendas. Then, inspired by theorist Donald Klein's “triangle of humiliation”, I will analyze the ambivalent role of the witness (physical or virtual) whose presence is necessary for one to be humiliated. This research will also be used to develop theoretical and methodological tools pertinent to new media and to the forms and new content that deploy it.

Nathan Thompson is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick in Sociology and the latest winner of the Christian Landry Award there. Nathan's PhD research uses critical ethnography to investigate "gaymer" (gay+gamer) groups emerging within larger mainstream video gaming communities. Research on gaming suggests that video gaming communities are often overtly and violently homophobic. The emergence of "gaymer" groups are a push back to the larger homophobic gaming community in an effort to create more visibility, acceptance, and content for LGBTQ gamers. His research is interested in the practices of the LGBTQ gamers within the space of the game as well as the importance of the "gaymer" groups as place of acceptance and belonging for LGBTQ people.

Nathan transferred to UNB from the University of Toronto where he completed his Master's and part of his PhD with the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS). Working with SDS he helped organize an international LGBTQ networking conference in partnership with the Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at City University of New York. He also began teaching courses in SDS and brought that experience with him to UNB where he introduced a course in sexuality studies.

Dr. Ashley Heaslip, a medical doctor trained at UBC-St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, is the latest winner of the Dr. Gary Gibson Lambda Foundation Award. This is the second time Lambda has given out this $1000 bi-annual research award. Ashley’s project concerns a hot topic for LGBTQ seniors these days – how to make residential care for them medically and emotionally supportive. The late Dr. Gary Gibson, a gay doctor whose work treating LGBT patients and people with HIV in Southern Ontario and British Columbia, inspired this award. Here is Ashley’s winning research project in her own words:

“`What should I do doctor? I’m grey, I’m gay and I’m scared of being in a nursing home.’ His words sat heavy with me and lead me to think: how do lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) older adults experience residential care? I had no answers for this 75-year-old male patient who I was seeing in a family practice office. His dementia was progressing, his partner had died, and he felt alone.

“I wanted to better understand the experiences of LGBTQ older adults as they age and require more complex care. I began by examining the academic literature and found that there was a small body of work exploring the unique experiences of LGBTQ older adults in long-term care. I also discovered that many LGBTQ elders voice a desire for LGTBQ-specific services as they age. Finally, the literature I reviewed helped me to realize that older non-heterosexual people are often left out of conversations relating to aging and care.

“A residential care facility in the West End of Vancouver is working to create a more welcoming and open space for LGBTQ elders, and as part of that effort, we have partnered together on a small research project. This project, titled ‘LGTBQ Elders and Residential Care: Experiences of Isolation and Resilience Explored through Art and Dialogue’ involves both an arts-based collage workshop, where each elder produced a piece of collage art as a representation of their experiences, and in-depth one-on-one interviews (N = 6) to further explore their experiences.

“The overall aim of the project is three-fold: 1) to contribute to the academic literature in the areas of aging and LGBTQ health, as well as the emerging field of ‘creative aging’ within public health; 2) to contribute to direct health care provision in residential care by providing the results gained through the study to residential care facilities, LGBTQ advocacy organizations, and policy-makers; and 3) to open space for broader, community-level conversations around aging and LGBTQ health through an art exhibit of the elders’ work. The West End Seniors Network and Qmunity are keen on supporting these community engagement efforts.

“My sincere hope is that this project will act as a small igniting force behind the efforts to raise awareness of the unique needs and experiences of LGBTQ older adults as they age and encourage a more open dialogue about issues of discrimination and resilience within the context of residential care.”

The latest winner of the Candis Graham Writing Scholarship in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Victoria is Jeremy R. Saunders, who is taking his final year of a Writing degree with a minor in Film Studies. Having experienced homophobia himself, Jeremy hopes to go on to take a Master's degree in either screenwriting or Film Studiesso that he can devote his career using film to "bring to light the diversity within this community and eliminate the intolerance and ignorance surrounding it." At the same time, he wants to create "well-rounded characters of all sexualities."He tells us that winning the Lambda award is a financial boost that should give him time to get involved in Pride community on campus during his final year at UVic. Congratulations, Jeremy, and best of luck. We hope that one day your name will be in lights!

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Lukas Bhandar, last year's Graham award winner, has since published an essay in Plenitude Magazine that explores body hair, mixed-race identities, and gay beauty standards. Lukas is pictured here with Pat McKenna, who was the partner of the late Candis Graham. Pat is the founder of the Candis Graham Writing Scholarship and among the generous donors who built this endowment. The winner of the 2012 award, Joy Fisher, has written a tribute to Graham, who was a mentor to many aspiring writers, straight and LGBT alike. Joy's article appeared in Plenitude Magazine.http://plenitudemagazine.ca/ Former Graham Award winner, Andrea Routley, edits the magazine. Andrea writes: "Plenitude Magazineaims to promote the growth and development of LGBTQ literature through a biannual publication of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, graphic narrative and short film by both emerging and established LGBTQ writers.Plenitudeaims to complicate expressions of queerness through the publication of diverse, sophisticated literary writing, graphic narrative and short film, from the very subtle to the brash and unrelenting."

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Lambda’s 2014 High School Winner: Using the Arts to mentor youth at home and abroad.

Maya Cook of Pender Island, BC is Lambda Foundation’s latest high school award winner.Maya has received the Jack Hallam Human Rights Award at Gulf Islands Secondary School (GISS) for her high academic standing and her leadership in human rights, particularly mentoring youth at home and abroad.Maya is passionate about the power of the arts to heal.She spent five months working in Bogata, Columbia, with two Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). They were Familia Ayara, founded by vulnerable, local youth who want to empower themselves through music, especially Hip Hop. There she facilitated vocal and other artistic workshops, photographed the group’s events and managed promotions. She also worked with Red Caqueta Paz, a community peace-building organization. She is pictured here in Columbia.

Closer to home, Maya has mentored local youth involved in Three On The Tree, an arts group on Pender Island, and, throughBig Brothers Big Sisters, is helping a little girl in elementary school. At her high school (GISS), she was part of the Respectful Relationships Youth Team, where she co-facilitated workshops for students in grades 4-10. The aim, she wrote, is “to foster healthy, peaceful communities and raise awareness of issues such as homophobia, sexism and racism.”

Maya Cook is continuing what has become a GISS student and grads’ tradition of supporting human rights. In this photo, a previous winner of the Hallam Award, Bailey Dalton, was a colourful and enthusiastic participant in this year’s Pride Parade on Salt Spring Island, BC.

Photo of Bailey Dalton by Michael Levy

Exciting changes to the Lambda Award at Gulf Islands Secondary School (GISS) in 2015

Starting with the academic year 2014- 2015, there will be one annual Jack Hallam Human Rights Award at GISS, with a tighter focus on LGBTI rights and how they connect with other human rights, such as racism, as well as exciting new ways to compete, through essays, media projects and community involvement.We want students to make the connections between discrimination aimed at LGBTI people and other forms of oppression in creative ways.

Jack Hallam, a resident of Salt Spring Island, BC, is Lambda's pioneer in sponsoring human rights awards in high schools. Through his generous donation to Lambda, these $1000 awards foster and reward youth who establish gay/straight alliances, foster anti-bullying initiatives and take positive action against racism and other forms of discrimination. We at Lambda Foundation hope to establish similar awards in other Canadian secondary schools with donations from people like you who care about our youth - just like Jack Hallam does.

]]>datagrl@gmail.com (infoservices)frontpageSun, 31 Jul 2011 21:43:43 +0000Welcome to Lambda Foundation!http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1%3Awelcome-to-lambda&catid=29%3Alambda-foundation&lang=en
http://www.lambdafoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1%3Awelcome-to-lambda&catid=29%3Alambda-foundation&lang=enLambda Foundation is a registered Canadian Charity with the special mission of creating scholarships, awards, and bursaries in support of lesbian, gay,,bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) research, education and awareness towards the advancement of equality and human rights.